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The Bums
My grandmother lived in the same neighborhood until she died at the age of 96. She told me this story when I was 14 years old. “About forty years ago, the neighbor to the left of our house was named Mr. Picini. He was an elderly man living alone. His wife had died a decade ago, and he did fairly well for himself with a small garden and a birdbath/bird feeder that he kept clean and full so he could watch the songbirds. Now, this was in the days where the majority of the neighborhood were Italians- most of us from the Northern part of Italy near the mountains. We watched out for one another. If a young mother down the street went into labor and her husband was on the night shift, one of us would watch her children while she got herself to the hospital. If someone needed some french bread for sandwiches, we’d send it over. You just helped each other, because that’s all you had, and that was enough. Now, I’d go over and help Mr. Picini with his laundry. This was back in the day where you could use a sunny day to dry your linens for free, and that’s just what we did. Being a lone man, he slept in a small twin bed and there weren’t a lot of sheets or blankets to wash. Mr. Picini did have arthritis pretty badly and was thankful for my help. We’d shake out the comforter and middle blanket outside and let the dust and stuff fly off, and then I’d strip the beds, change the sheets and wash a couple of the few outfits that he regularly wore. We were lucky because we owned a washing machine. Many other families did not. In exchange, Mr. Picini would offer us food from his garden or apples from his tree in the summer. And he let the boys cut across his yard and play ball from our front yard through his. One day, when I stooped down to the front corner of the bed because the fitted sheet had gotten stuck on one of the metal parts of the frame and I found this small wooden stick. It was about the thickness of a thick broom handle and maybe three feet in length. It looked like it had some sort of carving on it in Italian, but I was only taught how to speak the language and reading Italian is not my strong point. I made out a couple words, but they didn’t really make sense together, so I figured that I had read them wrong. Mr. Picini came into the room with a bag of his dirty clothing that he had gathered from the hamper in the bathroom just as I was about to put the stick back in its place and I jumped a little because he’d startled me. “Ah,” he said, “I see that you found it.” “What IS it, exactly?” I asked. “That,” he replied with a wrinkled grin, “Is my bum stick.” “Excuse me?” I replied, “But exactly what is a bum stick?” I probably shouldn’t have asked him- it was his private business, after all, and I didn’t want to pry into his private life. As neighbors, we helped each other, but there was a level of intimacy that you just never got into unless you became true friends, and Mr. Picini was still a neighbor first and foremost. “Well,” he replied, sitting down on the bed and groaning a little as the bed squeaked to accommodate his weight, “You see, sometimes bums get in here and ya have to beat ‘em out with the stick or they just won’t leave, and who knows what they might do?” I was horrified. Was he just joking with me or was he being serious? Sure, our neighborhood wasn’t perfect, and there were a certain number of ruffians and winos who would hang out by the train tracks and at the train depot a couple blocks down, but none of them ever seemed violent or dangerous. People locked their doors at night but during the day, we didn’t really have much to steal back then anyway, and so there was no real reason to lock doors then. “Don’t you lock your door at night?” I asked him, concerned. “Of course, but they can get in anyway,” he replied mildly, “They’ve got eyes like coal and mouths like gashes and they’ll crawl in any old keyhole or crack in a window. It doesn’t even matter. They find a way. The only way to deal with ‘em is to beat ‘em over the head with the bum stick and pray they learn their lesson.” I began to feel like he was pulling my leg. Surely he must be joking about these things! They sounded like a fairytale! “That doesn’t sound like any kind of bum I’ve ever seen.” I said, “They get too much to drink and they’re useless and pass out by the tracks, is the worst I’ve seen.” “Ah, but they’re really not proper people, these bums,” Mr. Picini looked sad, “They’re just looking for easy targets and unfortunately an old man is one of them.” After that, he didn’t really say more about it, just stood up and picked up the laundry bag. For some reason I couldn’t get what he said out of my head, and I thought about it when I was getting in bed that night. What exactly had he meant? I wasn’t sure. Mr. Picini died in his late nineties, which was fairly rare for the time. He didn’t have much local family, so everyone in the neighborhood helped with cleaning the home and brought food to the funeral reception. It turns out that most of the people in his family had died quite young- in their late thirties or early forties. In fact, there were more people from the neighborhood at his wake than family members! I guess I’m just feeling wistful, thinking about Mr. Picini, and those bums! Then my grandmother would laugh, the lines on her face and around her eyes relaxing as she looked out into her memories. One day, I was helping my grandmother vacuum her room and something went THUNK as it fell over onto the floor near the front left of her bed. It was the bum stick with the same carvings down the side. If you ask me, I think that we would all do well to have a bum stick by our beds. It is hard to say exactly what sort of people (who are not proper people) could come in the night with an appetite that must be beaten out of them.